Quotes

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.